Two more steps on a long journey.

Connecticut's DiJonai Carrington (21) drives to the hoop at TD Garden.

I have a new TV. Its picture is 10 inches bigger diagonally than the old one's was and it does a lot of things, only a fraction of which I've learned how to do. I think it can project two stations on the screen at the same time, but I don't have the patience to find out.

So there I was sitting before the big TV on Tuesday night, also employing my eight-year-old iPad to view a second station simultaneously -- and I am not at all ashamed to admit that I spent most of the evening with tears in my eyes.

On the big screen was the Democratic National Convention, a celebration of hope, optimism and inclusion that has been a refreshing contrast to the doom-and-gloom tone of its Republican counterpart about a month ago. On Tuesday, there were great speeches by former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama, and one of the most unique roll call votes in convention history to confirm Vice President Kamala Harris as the second woman to be nominated for the presidency and the first of Black and Asian descent to be a party's standard-bearer.

And on the smaller screen was a basketball game at the TD Garden in Boston, a first for that iconic arena -- the WBNA's Connecticut Sun playing host to the Los Angeles Sparks in the first game from that league to be played in Boston. The game drew a sellout crowd of 19,125, and it was rewarded with a come-from-behind, 69-61 win by the Sun over Los Angeles. The crowd was raucous, involved, enthusiastic and it even employed the classic "Beat L.A.!!" chants borrowed from the great Celtics-Lakers rivalry games of the past.

And I cried. Like a baby. 

Kamala Harris accepts the nomination.

On my screens were two events of great importance, one national and international in scope and the other long overdue in a city that touts itself as a bastion of liberalism but has not welcomed the WNBA into its city limits in the three decades of its existence. And since it's well known that I devoted almost 70 percent of my life doing as much as I could to promote women's equality in sports in this little corner of the world, I did feel at least a little invested in what happened on the basketball court and in the stands at the Garden.

And as for the nomination of Vice President Harris, I've always been one to support candidates of merit regardless of race, gender, party, sexual orientation or whatever. Despite my liberal leanings, I am not a registered Democrat. I'm what we in Massachusetts call "unenrolled." I have voted in 13 Presidential elections, choosing 11 Democrats and two Republicans. I've been a winner eight times and a loser five times. America has survived through all of them.

I was a proud voter for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and I will not play coy with my 2024 choice. I will be voting for Harris and her VP nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. I think the Democrats need to yank any semblance of control over the government from the despicable MAGA movement, which embraces racism, misogyny and xenophobia to support the notion of its leader of what a "great" America is. I am pleased with the direction in which Harris would take America because I believe liberalism equals compassion and progress as opposed to the constant refrain of hatred, grievances and retribution from the disaster that the Republican Party has become. 

In fact, I believe that anybody that identifies as Republican but does not support the extremism of Trump and his Nazi-like minions should be fully ashamed of themselves for not taking stronger stands against Trumpism. They are just as complicit in Trump's rise to power as anyone that marched in Charlottesville, Va., holding tiki torches and chanting Nazi tropes.

Donald Trump destroyed the USFL.

Harsh? Maybe. But I'm not the one that has to look in the mirror. I've despised Donald Trump since the 1980s, when he seized control of the United States Football League and promptly destroyed it because he couldn't mastermind a merger with the established NFL. I did not cheat on three successive wives, the latter a mail-order escort from Slovenia that was fraudulently given American citizenship and was not spared her own embarrassment when her husband had a well-publicized sexual tryst with an actress in pornographic films. I'm not the one that was found guilty of 34 felony counts in connection with covering up hush-money payments to that porn actress. I'm not the one that paid off several families under accusations of molesting underaged children. I never flew with Jeffrey Epstein to his "pleasure island" in the Caribbean. I never instigated an insurrection against the rightful United States government.

Should I go on? If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

So I watched the DNC every night -- choosing the C-SPAN telecasts instead of legacy media so I could watch without the coloring influence of analysis. That was refreshing. I even passed on the love of my media life, CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell, to not shade my opinion of the proceedings in either direction.

I'm sure some conservatives would say I was suckered into embracing the liberal line. Indeed, I've been waging that war on social media against people that absolutely cannot understand the differences and the veracity of what they see and hear from the two parties. But aside from the fact that the Democrats used complete sentences and did not invoke the example of a fictional serial killer to make a point, the messaging was so different, and so hopeful, that I could not help but be swayed.

Yes, there were excesses of "joy." The DNC often came off as a four-night variety special, and that musical roll call of the delegates was a shock at first. The issue was already settled because Kamala Harris had secured the needed number of delegates in a virtual roll call, but it grew on me after a while. After all, everyone was having fun -- and after having watched a Republican convention in which I was told that America is a shithole country that's going down the toilet and the only man that can save it is a silver-spoon-fed geriatric that has sucked on the teat of inherited wealth all his life and is about to be sentenced on those aforementioned felony convictions, well, I had my fill of negativity for the remainder of my life.

What was most striking about the DNC was the full commitment the party has made to ensure women's reproductive rights. I was touched to my very core by the stories of women who could not receive emergency care during failed pregnancies because the states in which they lived took the opportunity to pass harsh and draconian laws restricting abortion and related healthcare in the wake of the devastating reversal of Roe v. Wade by Donald Trump's conservative-stacked Supreme Court.

I have always applied one standard for forming opinions about issues such as abortion and LBGTQ+ rights, even though as a 70-year-old white heterosexual male, I can't really experience any of these issues first-hand. My reasoning is always to attempt to walk a mile in their shoes -- to try to determine how I would feel if I was experiencing the hate and discrimination felt by others.

The MAGA view of a "great" America.

I grew up in an era when the Southern states still openly discriminated against Blacks. My mother was from the central Florida hamlet of Williston, which our family visited annually in the 1950s and 1960s to see her aging parents. I don't believe my mother was a racist -- she certainly didn't raise me to be one -- but by the time I was 8 years old and able to understand the ways of the world, I knew that her hometown was definitely hostile to its African-American residents. I saw first-hand the "colored only" water coolers and entrances to public buildings, and even as a pre-teen, I knew enough to form my opinion by inserting myself into that plight. 

Now, more than 60 years later, I hear a former President talking about making America great again, and knowing that he means bringing the country back to a 19th-century mindset where people of color and all women were marginalized and subservient to white males, and it makes me sick to my stomach.

I am a fan of empowerment, especially of women. Practically every woman with whom I have had close relationships in my adult life have been smart, independent and motivated to make the most of the equality that was promised them -- if not entirely realized -- by the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. And most of them have been disappointed time after time by men that have denied then equal pay, equal opportunities, and equal rights to control their own bodies.

I vowed a long time ago to not be one of those men.

Jackie Cross, left, plays in a girls-boys
exhibition game in February 1971.

I've told the story before of how my high school sweetheart was the starting center of the Mansfield High girls' basketball team. She was 5-foot-11 and a very good athlete, and probably would have been even better if she had been able to benefit from the post-Title IX improvements in coaching and training methods that followed just a few years later. I was a part-time writer for the town's weekly newspaper and I covered all of the boys' sports, and one day, as Jackie and I were shooting some baskets, she asked me why I never covered any of her games.

I could have answered with the truth, that her games were in the afternoons at the opposite site of the boys, and I had to hitch rides on the team bus to cover the boys and thus fulfill the demands of the newspaper's editor. But I didn't.

Instead, I said, "It's only girls' basketball."

Big mistake. And to this day, I have not forgotten the look on her face. I had just marginalized the person that supposedly meant the most to me on this earth, and it was indicative of a complete lack of understanding and respect of something incredibly important to her. Not surprisingly, our relationship did not last beyond another two years.

She died of breast cancer in 1986, leaving behind a husband and four children. 

Meanwhile, in my first years at The Sun Chronicle, I carried on a flawed policy of cursory coverage of girls' sports before a pair of local coaches, Oliver Ames' Laney Clement-Holbrook and Seekonk's Dorene Menezes, cornered me in separate phone calls to tear me a new asshole over what they believed to be intentionally dismissive coverage of girls' sports. And at some point, their emotions transcended their words, and those emotions forced me to look at the situation from the viewpoint of someone being discriminated against, and not as a beneficiary of male privilege.

It took some convincing, but Peter Gobis and I embarked upon a quest to equalize the coverage of boys' and girls' high school sports. It was basically doubling our workload, as well as the space we commanded in the daily newspaper, but for many of my years at the paper, it was beneficial to us to have opened the pages of The Sun Chronicle's sports section to another 51 percent of the readership.

We caught holy hell at first. Some knuckle-dragging male readers thought we were taking something away from the boys' teams, when we were actually adding new content. I took the point in covering the girls' teams, and I got called every name in the book for it -- a pedophile, a stalker, a child molester, you name it -- just because I covered girls' teams and gave them my best effort. Oh, I also covered pro football, the manliest of manly sports, for 42 years. That didn't wash with the thick-skulled male chauvinists -- until they had daughters, and not sons, and were suddenly all-in on our policy of inclusion.

No, I didn't teach Sarah Behn my basketball skills.

I don't regret a thing. It was the most meaningful thing I've ever done in my life. I didn't have the opportunity to cure cancer or accomplish anything truly memorable, but I can say that at a time when women athletes were begging for respect and opportunities, they found an ally in me. 

I watched that game at the TD Garden knowing that I had nothing to do with its success. But I'm glad I lived long enough to see something like this happen in a city where it should have happened a very long time ago. It has been a personal goal to be able to see that level of acceptance of women's sports and to be able to stick in the faces of the morons that mocked me and the wonderful athletes I covered.

Unfortunately, they're not gone yet. One look at the reader comments under the Boston Globe's coverage of the Sun-Sparks game drove that point home. Ignorance is not in short supply in today's America. If it was, Donald Trump would have been cast upon the scrap heap of history long before he ever became President.

But it's another step forward.

I've said all along during this election cycle that women will be the salvation of the nation. Angry at the vacating of Roe v. Wade, they can turn the tide and erase the effectiveness of Trump's redneck base for that reason alone. And regardless of what you may feel about the process that took President Biden off the ballot, the Democrats put a talented and feisty female prosecutor in his place to seize the moment. Trump has no idea in the world how to run against Kamala Harris, so he resorts to his usual despicable and childish tropes -- mispronouncing her name intentionally, blaming her for everything wrong in the country, and of late, even re-tweeting scurrilous memes that purport her to be a transgender male.

If there is a God, Donald J. Trump will be burning in a particularly torturous corner of hell for all eternity. But since that can't be guaranteed here in the land of the living, the best we can do is throw him in jail when he is sentenced for his felony convictions in early September, and then throw him out of public life at the ballot box in November.

Oh, and Taylor Swift, if you're paying attention -- a few well-chosen words from you will also help. A lot.

Mark Farinella is still awaiting delivery of his Harris/Walz bumper stickers. Comment on his opinions at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering ...

King Philip football will again be coming your way on North TV this fall.

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering while trying to find something other than gymnastics on my TV set this past week ...

** It's now officially less than a month before I'll be back behind the North TV microphone for another season of high school sports coverage, starting with the King Philip football team's visit to Turco Field at Walpole High School on Sept. 6, a 5:45 p.m. start.

This will be my seventh season at North TV and sixth doing play-by-play. My, how time does fly when you're having fun. And to think, I wasn't even collecting Social Security when I started doing this gig.

I got a tentative schedule from the bosses a couple of weeks ago, and in addition to my usual fall forays into field hockey, soccer and volleyball, I have a substantial schedule of games involving the defending Division 2 state champion KP football Warriors as well as one game apiece at Bishop Feehan and Tri-County.

Here's the tentative football schedule I'm looking at: Sept. 6, KP at Walpole (5:45 p.m.); Sept. 13, Marblehead at KP (7 p.m.); Sept. 20, KP at Norwood (6 p.m.); Sept. 27, Foxboro at KP (7 p.m.); Oct. 5, Diman at Tri-County (1 p.m.); Oct. 18, Taunton at KP (7 p.m.); Oct. 19, Bishop Fenwick at Bishop Feehan (1 p.m.); Oct. 25, KP at Milford (7 p.m.); Nov. 1, KP at Attleboro (6:30 p.m.); Nov. 8, 15 and 22, MIAA Football Playoffs, time and sites TBA; Nov. 28, Franklin at KP (10 a.m.). And if KP makes it to its fourth straight Super Bowl berth, I'm pretty sure we'll be at Gillette Stadium to bring you the call.

The only KP football game we don't have on the docket right now is the Warriors' Oct. 10 game at Sharon (a Thursday due to the Jewish holidays), but I'll let you know if that changes. 

Some of these road games may pose a few problems for the North TV telecasting crew, in that most of these fields don't have large press boxes that can accommodate visiting media. We've been at some of the fields before in the past and have made adjustments by sitting in the stands (all the while praying for good weather to protect the electronics from harm). The last time we broadcast a game from Walpole, in fact, we didn't even do the game; it was in 2018, my first year with the North TV crew, but we picked up the Walpole Cable telecast (featuring former Sun Chronicle sports correspondent Rick Brown on the play-by-play).

In preparation for the challenges ahead, I visited all of the potential road sites a little more than a week ago to scout out possible broadcast locations where we can access electrical power (very important). And of course, I'll try to employ my well-known charm (ha!) to coax athletic directors of the host schools to look fondly upon our requests.

There are bulges in the boards.

I also have to get in touch with the folks at Tri-County to see if indeed they still have a press box. 

Last year, Alex Salachi and I did an early-season game against Case High at T-C, where there is a wooden press box with a great view built atop a berm behind the stands. But it has felt a little creaky in recent years, and a week after we did that game, Tri-County condemned that structure because there were bulges and holes in the front wall, as the accompanying photo shows.

Oh, well, if there wasn't an element of challenge to the job, it wouldn't be hardly as much fun.

** As the opening salvo of this column indicated, I'm a little fatigued by all of the gymnastics coverage NBC puts on prime-time TV in the Olympics.

Simone Biles is the GOAT. Now, 
what else is happening in Paris?

By noting that, in no way do I mean to disparage the outstanding performances of the U.S. team, which will be bringing tons of glory and gold back home. And if anything, I feel really good about their success, because the 2024 U.S. team is made up of mature women and not the tiny teens of olde who used to be force-fed puberty-blocking drugs to keep them in their waif-like forms. Simone Biles is 27 years old and still the best in the world, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if she finds a way to be ready for the Los Angeles games in 2028. That feels a lot more normal.

But my beef is that NBC seems to think that there are no sports worth watching in prime-time other than women's gymnastics. Now, even as I typed that, I know it wasn't entirely true -- we got a lot of swimming this past week, and I'm glad we did, because Katie Ledecky's ongoing successes are simply wonderful to watch. 

We even got to see Stoughton native Frederick Richard compete at a high level for the men's gymnastics team. And once the track and field competition began, NBC grudgingly carved out a few minutes for it.

But what about men's basketball? Women's basketball? Women's soccer? High-profile sports guaranteed to have a lot of built-in interest for the American audience? They've been relegated to the USA Network (I was amazed it's still on TV) or streaming service Peacock. I don't have to pay extra for Peacock because it's part of my Comcast/Xfinity cable subscription, but a lot of people must pay for it -- and I've heard my share of complaints about that, especially since NBC has started to put some NFL telecasts exclusively on its streaming partner.

Of course, I'm a 70-year-old white guy. I'm not NBC's target demographic for prime-time telecasts of any sort of entertainment programming, let alone the Olympics. So I know that these complaints are basically an exercise in pissing into the wind. But I just wanted to get it off my chest so I can get the blood pressure down a few notches.

** I watched the introduction of Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, if for no other reason than to find out exactly who the guy was. Can't say I knew beforehand.

But I've got to admit, I was impressed.

The Dem ticket: Gov. Walz and VP Harris.

Some might have been concerned because the VP passed on other, more famous possibilities such as Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a former astronaut, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who gave one hell of an introductory speech before the announcement in Philadelphia on Tuesday. And some look askance at Minnesota voters because, you may recall, they also elected pro wrestler Jesse Ventura as their governor years ago.

Gov. Walz (pronounced Walls), however, is a real slice of middle America with a huge conscience.

He's 60, bald, and looks a lot older than that (actor Brad Pitt is actually older), but he jokingly credits that to his many years as serving as a middle school lunch hall monitor during his teaching career. He was a social studies teacher and football coach at a school in Mankato, Minn., and he has the distinction of having been the defensive coordinator for a team that went from a winless finish to a state championship in one year's time. Many of his former players have already come forward to praise him for being not just an inspirational coach. but also a concerned and committed teacher that served as a positive role model.

As an aside, the company in Wisconsin that owned my former newspaper, The Sun Chronicle, also owned a television station in Mankato, Minn. About all I know about that is that a lot of the money we made in Attleboro back in our fat-and-happy days helped keep that TV station afloat for many years.

Coach Walz also became the first member of the school's faculty to serve as advisor to the school's Gay-Straight Alliance, which further illustrates the depth of his commitment to the well-being of his school's students.

A long-time member of the Army National Guard that was deployed overseas after 9/11, former Sergeant Major Walz was a U.S. congressman from Mankato's district (usually notoriously Republican) for 12 years. He was known at the time as a relatively conservative Democrat that was willing to work with his GOP counterparts to get the business of the country done. And as governor, he helped codify women's reproductive rights into state law, and he was a staunch defender of transgender rights. He helped ensure free meals for students in Minnesota public schools.

And he's getting some flak from MAGA trolls for another of his accomplishments -- free distribution of sanitary products for women in the state's high schools. 

Let me tell you why this resonates with me. 

No, I've never menstruated. But one of my closest female friends used to, and there was a time in her life when she would use nothing but the "all-natural" cotton tampons from a famous manufacturer because she feared the dangers of using tampons that were made from synthetic materials. Unfortunately, the major manufacturer decided to phase out the "all-natural" product, and they rapidly disappeared from supermarket shelves around here.

The phase-out was gradual and regional, so on one of my Patriots road trips (to Cleveland, in fact), I embarked upon a "quest for tampons" for my friend. I must have hit every Wal-Mart, KMart and supermarket within a 50-mile radius of Cleveland on the day before the game, and I bought every box of the "all-natural" product that I could find -- so many, in fact, that I had to buy another duffel bag to pack them for my return flight home.

Now, who does that? But anyone with a beloved female friend, or with daughters, might actually understand how important it is for them. Gov. Walz obviously understood that high school is a very sensitive time for girls that have just reached sexual maturity, and that the least he could do was to make sure they had the product available to them in case of need.

The Repugnicans are calling him "Tampon Tim" because of that action. That's just another example of how, during the Trump era, the Grand Old Party has become an engine of hate and intolerance -- especially against women.

Anyway, Gov. Walz gave one hell of a speech Tuesday, and I have to admit, I would have been willing to run out onto the field ready to play football for him -- even at my advanced age, with my excessive girth and two bad knees. But more importantly, I'll vote for him.

It's true, I probably would have voted for a loaf of bread before I'd ever vote for Donald Trump and his sleazeball VP nominee (who, rumor has it, has been barred from all Bob's Discount Furniture stores). But I'm feeling really good about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and I hope my fellow voters of good conscience will as well. It is time for the MAGA movement to be repudiated in totality.

** I saw someone driving a Tesla Cybertruck around my hometown the other day. I wanted to pull up aside and ask the driver why he (or she, I didn't know) wanted to buy anything made by Elon Musk, whose true colors have come out of late with his unabashed conversion to the MAGA movement. But discretion proved the better part of valor.

Seriously, I've always wanted to make the personal conversion to electric. I've owned two hybrids in my lifetime, a Toyota Prius and a VW Jetta, and I was quite pleased with the higher gas mileage and the knowledge that I was using less fossil fuels.

Cybertruck: Truly, a steaming heap of shit.

But I'm a little bit of a hypocrite. At this stage of my life, I own two members of the Mercedes-Benz family, a GLC 300 SUV and a C 300 cabriolet. They are both pre-owned, they both have the same 4-cylinder engine, they both get around 25 MPG and I don't drive either anywhere near as much as the cars I owned when I was fully employed. If I make it to 10,000 total miles a year these days (as opposed to 20,000 back in 2018), it's more than I expected. Besides, I'm worth it.

I actually did consider a Tesla in my last round of frenzied buying, but the price for a new one was still prohibitive, and I still have concerns over the mileage range and how adverse weather affects the life of a charge. Plus, as I have learned of late, Tesla build quality is notoriously poor, with uneven trim gaps and a multitude of interior upholstery problems, and even the slightest glitch can lock you out of your car and shut down all functions, making it practically impossible to get to a service facility. 

And the Cybertruck? Well, it's just a piece of shit. 

No thanks, I've had it with Musk. He absolutely ruined Twitter, turning the renamed "X" into a sanctuary for hate speech -- including his own. He recently posted a comment saying that civil war in the U.S. was an "eventuality."

Well, fuck him and the Cybertruck he rode in on. If I'm still driving when the Benzes have worn out, I may yet consider an electric car -- but the last company to get my business and hard-earned dollars will be Tesla.

** One last summer basketball league session for me, and that's tonight (Wednesday) at Franklin High. I'll be watching Mansfield playing Medfield at 7 and Foxboro taking on Franklin at 8. 

Kudos to FHS coach John Leighton for running an excellent league this year. Can't wait for the season to begin -- but I'm not ready to give up the warm weather quite yet.

** As I prepare to close this column, I'll leave you with one thought. I now know why high jumper Dick Fosbury created the "flop" method of jumping so many years ago. 

He never would have known this, of course, but going over the bar back-first definitely prevents the fate that befell French pole vaulter Anthony Ammirati when he was denied an Olympic gold because his "junk" dislodged the bar.

Does it really pay to advertise? 

Mark Farinella still wishes that Caitlin Clark was on the U.S. women's basketball team. Contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.

Alas, poor Norah, I barely knew ye.

Norah O'Donnell reads several newspapers a day to prepare for work.

I received several messages of condolence this week regarding someone that did not die.

The messages came mostly from my friends and current and former contemporaries in local journalism circles, who assumed (tongue in cheek, of course) that I would be distraught over the announcement that CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell would be leaving her post behind the anchor desk after the presidential election and assuming a new role at CBS News as a senior correspondent.

As an aside, I have to chuckle at the reference of "senior" in regard to Ms. O'Donnell, who is only 50. But then I remember that in the last decade of my employment at The Sun Chronicle, my job title was actually "senior sports writer" with the rank of an editor, even though I had just entered my 50s as well. Besides, 50 is when you become eligible for your AARP card, so I guess it's appropriate.

Anyway, many of my friends are fully aware, and probably amused, by the fact that I have had a longstanding "crush" on Ms. O'Donnell (to whom I will respectfully refer for the remainder of this missive by her first name to cut down on the number of keystrokes). I'd like to think of it more as a reflection of my admiration for her professional accomplishments, and less as a creepy obsession with a famous woman, but I can't control how others will perceive it. After all, my computers do feature the photo appearing at the top of this post (I believe it was taken for a magazine feature story) as the wallpaper screen.

I will admit, she's easy to look at. I'd be lying to you if I tried to deny that. It was probably helpful to some extent in her professional career arc, which rose over a 28-year span from roles as chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC, White House correspondent for NBC and then CBS, co-anchor of CBS This Morning, and finally the anchor and managing editor for the most highly regarded of the three original networks' evening news telecast, the CBS Evening News. TV, as they say, is a visual medium. I, on the other hand, have always had a face for radio.

But the fact is that her résumé describes a rise to the top that is based upon a high level of professional accomplishment, and should definitely be held up as a shining example to young women entering the news business. Unlike the recipe for success at the so-called "most watched" news network in the country, Fox News, Norah advanced through the television news ranks without dying her hair blonde, pushing her chest out of her blouses and exposing every inch of her legs. She did it by being a damned good journalist, and that's why she worked at legitimate and respected media outlets and made it to the top of the mountain. She is, and pardon the archaic gender reference, an old-fashioned newsman.

Unfortunately, the role of anchor for the CBS Evening News just doesn't mean what it once did in the eyes of the viewing public.

I started watching TV when the 6:30 p.m. national newscasts lasted only 15 minutes. Not long after, there were only two legitimate choices if you wanted to be informed -- the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and the Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC, anchored by veteran newsmen Chet Huntley out of New York and David Brinkley in Washington.

Walter Cronkite

The kingpin, of course, was Cronkite -- the veteran radio newsman that cut his teeth reporting from London in the 1940s alongside Edward R. Murrow during the horrific aerial bombing campaign by Nazi Germany. Cronkite succeeded Douglas Edwards in 1962 as the anchor of the evening TV news and became over his 19-year tenure in the job "the most trusted man in America."

Cronkite was not only trusted, he also was influential. He did a series of reports about the Vietnam War following the Tet Offensive in early 1968, and concluded his findings with an editorial revealing that military leaders believed the war could not be won. Once that hit the airwaves, Americans by the millions turned against the conflict -- leading then-President Lyndon B. Johnson to supposedly remark, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

By the time I entered print journalism, all three networks had traditional nightly news telecasts. But eventually, new technology would create new opportunities. CNN (Cable News Network) was founded in 1980 by Atlanta-based billionaire Ted Turner as a 24-hour news network, a service he believed the three legacy networks could not provide. Australian news magnate Rupert Murdoch countered with Fox News in 1996, giving voice to conservative pundits whose job it was to attack the supposed liberal slant of CNN and the mainstream print and broadcast media. NBC teamed up with Microsoft founder Bill Gates to create MSNBC not long after, giving a legacy network a prominent place in the growing cable market. And over the many years that followed, plenty of imitators have risen and fallen in a news market that now includes direct satellite access and streaming from anyone with a camera and a microphone.

As a result, many Americans today get their news whenever, wherever and however they want it -- always available and with whatever slant is preferred. It doesn't have to be accurate, fact-based or agenda-free. If you're stupid enough to believe anything Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity or Alex Jones says as "news," nothing I can say or do will convince you that you're being sadly misinformed.

Which brings me back to the topic of Norah O'Donnell.

I was first introduced to her on my treadmill.

No joke -- and by "introduced," I mean seeing her on TV for the first time. Sadly, I've never met her in person.

When I lived in North Attleboro, I had a treadmill set up in front of a television set in my apartment. I would run (very slowly) on it at the same time almost every day, and watch news programming while trying to ignore the pain in my knees. Back then, there was a program on MSNBC called "Watch It!" hosted by Laura Ingraham -- long before she became a shrieking, smarmy shill for the MAGA movement on Fox News, of course. It was a fairly concise, and only slightly conservative, presentation of the day's events that included check-ins with NBC News correspondents when the news of the day warranted them. Norah was a frequent contributor to the program as NBC's Washington correspondent, and her reports were always superior to just about anything else on the program.

Fast forward ahead to 2012, when I had grown tired of the overly chatty Today show on NBC and wanted something with a little more of a harder news edge as I started my day. At the same time, CBS revamped its morning show (renaming it CBS This Morning) and created a three-person anchor team led by master interviewer Charlie Rose and former local news anchor and Oprah Winfrey confidant Gayle King. Norah became the third anchor after tweaking to the show replaced original co-anchor Erica Hill, bringing along her street cred as CBS White House correspondent to the hard-news role among the troika.

Norah interviewed "Billions" star
Maggie Siff on CBS This Morning.

I loved the show. Rose, as he did on his long-running PBS program, conducted probing and insightful interviews of newsmakers and celebrities. King provided the pop-culture fluff expertise (as well as her Oprah connection). And Norah was there to be the hard-news interviewer when controversial guests from the political world tried to stonewall the panel.

It was a worthy experiment, and it made some ratings gains against the competition of NBC's Today and ABC's Good Morning America. But it also had its drawbacks. Rose was showing signs of losing his fastball as he entered his 70s, and King's presence was often insufferable, as she would frequently interrupt Norah's interviews and inject her own lightweight opinions into them.

Then, in 2017, news reports revealed that Rose had a 20-year history of sexually harassing co-workers, and he was fired from his role as CBS This Morning co-anchor. The news hit Norah particularly hard, as her reporting style meshed well with Rose's famed interviewing skills. When she and King returned to the program a few days after the shocking news, she read a statement that said in no uncertain terms that Rose's behavior could not be tolerated in the modern workplace.

The show foundered from that upheaval, going through a plethora of temporary co-anchors and losing ground in the ratings. But by 2019, Norah had already established herself as the rising star at CBS News, and that's when she was chosen to succeed Jeff Glor as anchor of the evening news in an effort to raise the program from a distant last place in the Nielsen ratings.

Almost immediately, Norah wielded extraordinary power over the news division. The nightly telecast was moved from New York to Washington, in part to accommodate her family life (she is married to Washington restauranteur Geoff Tracy and they have three children), at the same time claiming that Washington was the best location to get the pulse of the nation and have rapid access to big national and world stories breaking in the nation's capital.

Norah became CBS' lead anchor in 2019.

Almost as rapidly, the tone of the nightly newscast changed -- and not necessarily for the better.

As a long-time news viewer raised in the Cronkite era, I always believed CBS to be the most serious in tone of the three network newscasts. Even through the anchoring tenures of Dan Rather, Bob Schieffer, Katie Couric, Scott Pelley and Glor, I saw CBS as the harder-news option among the three. But when Norah took over, there were obvious changes -- more feature material, lighter-toned pop culture stories and a strong emphasis upon features and stories about groundbreaking women.

Granted, women probably are the most underrepresented demographic in the world of news. And it's probably the vestigial remnants of male privilege that still reside deep within me that prompted me to consider the sudden increase in coverage of women's issues as disproportional over the course of a 30-minute telecast. I'm sure many would disagree with me, and they are probably correct to do so.

I've come to regard the NBC Nightly News as the current hard-news leader (except for the constant promotion that telecast has of the network's special-event programming, like the Olympics), and I see ABC's telecast as Fox News Lite, with a somewhat sensationalistic tone and a reliance upon the old trope, "If it bleeds, it leads."

But all three programs are practically irrelevant in today's news landscape. People are hardly watching any of them anymore. And the CBS Evening News on Norah's watch failed to make a dent in the ratings. I watched loyally for about a year after she became the anchor, but gradually, my viewing became more sporadic as daily life imposed itself upon the 6:30-7 p.m. window. Most of the daily reporting also shows up on my Facebook feed, so I could pick and choose what and when I wanted to see.

Following the announcement of Norah's departure and reassignment, CBS will return the show to New York (more cost effective) and change the format to closely resemble the news division's stalwart 60 Minutes, emphasizing longer story segments and investigations. As she is already a frequent contributor to 60 Minutes, Norah will likely contribute frequently to the new version of the nightly newscast in her new role as a modern-day Barbara Walters.

Norah reporting from Helsinki.

It's not like she didn't try to make a larger impact. CBS put Norah out front from the very start of her anchor tenure. They put her in military aircraft during rescue or reconnaissance missions, at the scenes of weather-related disasters, in Minneapolis during the unrest that followed George Floyd's death at the hands of local police, overseas for important summit meetings -- and she was relentless in her pursuit of the facts behind sexual harassment of female cadets at the country's military academies, winning prestigious awards for her reporting. 

She was the lead anchor for political coverage. She also revived an old Murrow-era standby called "Person to Person," a show that appeared on CBS News' online site that featured her interviewing celebrities with a lighter tone to give her some pop culture cred. And she went public with her skin cancer diagnosis and was an advocate for early detection and treatment.

She gave it a good five-year college try in the big job. And her legacy may be that of being the anchor of the last traditional nightly newscast CBS produced. That's far more a reflection upon the American viewing public and its short and dubious attention span than it is upon her performance in the job.

Before I close, I will admit to a certain level of disappointment that my path has never crossed with Norah's, even though we've come close on occasion.

Norah was born and raised in San Antonio and spent her formative years as part of a military family, living in South Korea for a few years. She later attended Georgetown University -- but somewhere along the way, and heaven knows how, she became a huge fan of the New England Patriots. She's attended several games over the years -- occasionally as a guest in Robert Kraft's private box -- and she's even reported stories here, including an in-depth look at Tom Brady's TB12 training facility at Patriot Place while she was a co-anchor on CBS This Morning.

I was on the Patriots beat at the time, of course, and I didn't know until after the fact that she had conducted an interview at the training facility on a day when I was attending to the usual daily coverage at the stadium. 

Now, there is no way that I would have tried to weasel my way into her interview session. That would have been totally unprofessional. But what if she might have wanted to drop in on a daily Bill Belichick press conference just out of curiosity, given her abiding love for the team? I definitely would have mustered the courage to introduce myself and express my respect for her professional accomplishments -- and hopefully keep it polite, dignified and nowhere near as creepy as it may sound. After all, for heaven's sake, I'm sure I would have remembered that I was a grown man 20 years older than her, and that I've been around celebrities all my professional life without acting like a gushing idiot.

I'm pretty sure I would have. Pretty sure.

Anyway, I offer my best wishes to Norah O'Donnell as she embarks upon her new responsibilities at CBS News following the election. And I repeat what I said earlier in this post -- if you, dear reader, are a young woman entering journalism or know one that is, please take note of how Norah O'Donnell took every step up the ladder, with professionalism, an unimpeachable work ethic, and a dedication to excellence worthy of the legacy of titans of the business such as Walter Cronkite. Embrace her as a worthy role model.